The Cultural Geography of the Hallyu: Mapping the World through Korean Popular Culture

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, May 13-15, 2014.

The popularity of Korean films, TV dramas, pop music, and online games has been phenomenal, continuously reaching audience in many parts of the world. It has also gained scholarly attention from researchers beyond Korean studies who approach the content and the phenomenon of Hallyu from multiple perspectives. In response to the growing interest in Hallyu among scholars of popular culture, media studies, gender studies, spectatorship, and visual culture, The Department of East Asian Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and The World Association of Hallyu Studies (WAHS) is hosting the second international conference on Hallyu, focusing on the ways in which Korean popular culture produces a new geopolitical knowledge about Korea and map out social and cultural lives of audience inside and outside Korea.

Visual media plays a significant role in mediating the knowledge of place, space, distance, and scale; and produces meanings of individual and national identity, nationhood, and the world’s imaginary map. The conference, the cultural geography of Hallyu, is an attempt to examine how the mapping of representations and realities of Korea is constructed through Hallyu; how it generates and mediates knowledge about Korean culture and society; and finally how it helps people to imagine their position (both physical and cognitive) in the world vis-à-vis Korea.

We welcome individual papers and panel proposals from scholars working in various genres of Korean popular culture and cultural geography, including (but not limited to) film studies, gender and race studies, media studies, cultural studies, political science, etc. whose interest fits in one or more of the following issues:

(a) Representation, distribution, circulation of spatial senses of Korea in the world.
(b) Audience reception/perception of, and fandom of Korean popular culture.
(c) Technologies (audio, visual, textual, etc.) and techniques (visual compositions, textual narrations, rhetoric, etc.) of constructing geopolitical particularities and universalities of Korea.
(d) Industry, policies, and promotions involving the production of the geopolitical imaginations of Korea.
(e) Korean popular culture dissemination and the construction of alternative geopolitics.

Proposals (both individual and panel proposals), including name, institutional affiliation, the title of the paper, and an abstract of 500 words maximum (with relevant keywords listed), should be sent by November 15, 2013 to KoreanWaveMiddleEast@gmail.com. Successful applicants would be asked to send their complete paper of 6,000 words (including bibliography and footnotes) at least three weeks prior to the conference. The organizers will make an effort to secure funding for accommodations to presenters from abroad.

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